The new contours of digital marketing are quickly replacing traditional marketing. And the most important element of digital marketing is content marketing.
As an entrepreneur, you are well aware that the right marketing strategy is the key to a successful business. But with traditional marketing in the backdrop, are you ready to embrace content marketing?
Here’s what you need to know about integrating content marketing into your strategy and its advantages.
The Pros of Content Marketing:
Content marketing can help you transform leads to returning customers and tap into your business’s undiscovered customer bases. Read on to find out about the benefits of content marketing.
Higher ROI
Content marketing will always have a higher return on investment, regardless of whether you produce your own content or outsource it.
Content marketing leads to higher ROI because it is a cost-friendly strategy. Your budget for content marketing will be less than half of that of traditional marketing, but you will end up generating three to four times more leads!
Develop Trust and Confidence
Content marketing helps you connect with your customer base and present a more personalized and humanized face of your business. This is very helpful for gaining customers’ trust and confidence.
Moreover, your customer base keeps on increasing as your readers share your content with their friends.
So, content marketing enables businesses to gain way more than they spend on their marketing strategy – both in material and non-material terms.
Better SEO Results
You have already carried out your keyword research for your website. It is now time to put that research to another use: Convert your SEO keywords into baselines for your blogs!
This will help your page in acquiring organic traffic resulting in higher search engine rankings.
Designing an Effective Content Marketing Strategy:
It is crucial to have a clear strategy in place. Even if you put out great content without a clear plan, it won’t be able to fetch you the kind of results you are hoping for.
Designing a content marketing strategy is not as daunting as it sounds. Here’s how you can devise an effective content marketing strategy:
What are your goals? Write them down!
Identify your goals: What results do you want your content marketing to yield? Whether you want your content marketing to generate better brand recognition, higher sales or a more extensive customer base, just write it down.
This will help you get a realistic picture of your content marketing strategy and set clear goals.
Understand Your Audience
What kind of people do you want to reach out to? Who makes the majority of your customers? It is important that you recognize and identify your target audience and devise your content writing strategy keeping their interests in mind.
Work on a Schedule
Put a schedule in place. You might want to consider how often you want to push out the content and then, design your plan. Remember, consistency is the key. In the world of digital content marketing, people will only remember you if you are around!
This consistency will help you gain a loyal and returning readership, which results in loyal customers! It is always a good idea to see what kind of schedule your competitors follow before you design your own. This way, you’ll know what you are up against.
Brainstorm
Having brainstorming sessions can help you plan ahead. Some useful pointers for your brainstorming sessions:
- What does your audience want and like?
- What questions does your audience usually ask or might ask?
- What content are your competitors pushing out?
- What are your SEO keywords? You can use them as baselines.
Don’t limit yourself to blogs
Content Marketing is not just about writing blog posts. Although it’s true that blogs are the most prominent feature of content marketing, there’s more to it. Explore content marketing avenues on Social Media, Email Newsletters, Podcasts, Interviews and FAQs, Webinars and Videos.
You can recycle your content on all these platforms. Write a blog about a certain topic, create videos about it after a few months and then, maybe conduct webinars or have podcasts.
Having an effective content marketing strategy will increase your brand recognition and you will be able to connect on a more personal level with your audience.
The best thing about content marketing is that it doesn’t require an elaborate budget and so it is equally efficient and doable for small businesses as it is for large-scale companies. The key to a successful content marketing strategy is to be clear about your goals and consistent in your actions.
Scott Hall has twenty plus years in search and ten in enterprise software and has helped drive digital growth for many small businesses. Learn more about Scott and his powerful and effective marketing techniques at ScottHall.co.
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